VIDEO

EarWitness (selections)

I am developing a unique programme entitled EarWitness that strives to challenge our preconceptions of pianist and piano. It embraces a wide range of performance practices, theatrical elements and emotional pathways. This project expands my creative boundaries and challenges how we hear and see the piano. Animating the concert stage, EarWitness is an innovative, multi sensory journey leading its audience through layered emotional musical worlds; contrastingly introspective, startling, playful, poetic, and urgent

Below you can find documentation of some of the pieces involved in EarWitness. We are in the process of integrating these works into a coherent dramatic presentation which will include edits and changes to the works.

This documentation does not represent the final version but should give you a sense of certain aspects of the show.

EarWitness received New Chapters development funds from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Complete David Lynch Etudes by Nicole Lizée written for and performed by Eve Egoyan (this work will be edited for EarWitness)

Homonymy by John Oswald performed by Eve Egoyan

EV∃ by artist Michael Snow written for and performed by Eve Egoyan (this work will be edited for EarWitness)

Other works with video or for disklavier:

Simple Lines of Enquiry by Ann Southam written for and performed by Eve Egoyan with Machine for Taking Time by David Rokeby (excerpt)

This presentation is the meeting of two independent works of art; the music and video are not explicitly synchronized, but move through time in compatible ways that enliven each other. Both works involve a process of unfolding – a camera pans across a city and across time; the music explores of the emotional possibilities of a twelve-interval row. Each embraces extreme detail and timeless expansiveness. The held sonorities of the piano link seamlessly to the subtle pan/shift of images through time. They are both gently emotional contemplations of transience; places of remembering and letting go.

Simple Lines of Enquiry (2007) by Ann Southam

Written for Eve Egoyan, Simple Lines of Enquiry is an eloquent and quietly emotional work relying on its slow unraveling to evoke a magically suspended, weightless sound world. Its stillness and intimacy invite listeners’ into an environment of deep listening and contemplation.

“2009: Ten Exceptional Recordings… The test of a great recording is whether you find yourself temporarily unable to live without it. For certain overlapping periods this year, I couldn’t stop listening to… Ann Southam’s immense, mysterious piano piece Simple Lines of Enquiry.” — Alex Ross, The New Yorker

To create Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent), David Rokeby positioned cameras high on a building in Montreal and recorded 750.000 images over the course of a year, capturing a broad swath of the city in every season, in every angle of light, and in every weather condition. The resulting database of images is explored by a computer, which stitches together leisurely continuous pans across the city, staying true to the spatial trajectory but shifting unpredictably through time.

Palimpia by John Oswald written for and performed by Eve Egoyan

Pianist Eve Egoyan is a composer´s dream. The largeness of her spirit informs everything she plays with its sensitivity to the tiniest nuance, and her perceptive ability to make strange and unheard-of detail fit together in the most convincing way. – Halifax Chronicle-Herald